Prolegomena to Any Future Editorial
The critic need not be able to do better than that with which he finds fault.
—G.E. Lessing
1.
Let us presume, for a moment, that illiteracy need not represent a line dividing those who can read from those who cannot, but instead refers to the habit of hanging private thoughts on the framework of grammar. We begin with a simple dictum that the reader does not find what she desires, but desires only what she finds. Without abandoning this second structure of identification, the adherence to a generic world turns into its opposite and the reader of our dictum comes to impute into herself the categorical imperative to subject everything other than self to self. Perhaps with this rendition we approach understanding how a society inundated with words can be so suspicious of ideas. Even now, the authors cannot help but suspect that the mediating universals between each sentence appear as bottomless chasms inviting resentment from the reader.
Under the defensive mechanism of seeing oneself in everything, reading requires that when aversion stirs an attentive unfollowing is practiced. Who today hasn’t learned to live by distraction? Apperception then, born out of the discovery of imitation, culminates in a thought: this is the way things work. Seemingly facile, the approach advances the means by which language dwells in the presence of husks.
It follows that the projection of the reader is a prohibition on the writer. Just as one finds in clichés the experience that is his due, so must readers find in the appearance of words on a page ideas adequate to themselves. ‘Have you read [insert a name that identifies a milieu]?’ turns into exacting a reply ethically appropriate with the life of a shared fantasy. In response, how might one discern and trace a social economy of reading and writing whose ideal model is the wordless furniture assembly manual?
The present authors thereby invite those interested to participate in the dilemma of a journal that, in all likelihood, will not be read. Bothered by the fact that the leniency of language has turned against itself, this introduction outlines the terrain and substance of Cured Quail. We would like to approach the fact that words, like the lives that carry them, appear predominantly without meaning—while, following in the spirit of Karl Kraus’ Die Fackel, refusing to look the other way. Rather than cynically guilt people into reading more, Cured Quail would like to encourage others to indulge in the discontinuity between themselves and what is to be read. The aporia potentially offers an alternative to readers who, justly distrusting the authors, find in that disjuncture experiential content. After all, words subsist in saying something that hasn’t been thought or thinking something that cannot be said.
2.
Ours is, without fail, an epoch lacking the incentive to pause in the presence of an idea. We read the way we do everything else: sycophantically, timidly, incoherently. A book can be both a bestseller and, at the same time, the most widely unread.[1] In the past, the breakdown of authority gave prominence to ideas. They used to ride in on horseback. Now, the impatience over long ideas fades into a skepticism over their very existence. ‘[E]ars which have not let themselves be deprived of their native sensitivity cannot help hearing that they are talked into something.’ Forced into pandering to the experience of its patron and affirming what is already the case, an ‘idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, [lacking] the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.’
Words obstinately remain the medium in which the first integration between subject and object takes place, ‘the great medium of spiritual unity.’ When considering the circulation of a thought, it would be inaccurate to elicit the analogy of the commodity, the latter at least incorporates a law of competition. Rather picture a clump of fallen leaves, half floating, half sunk, in a kiddie pool for the contemporary efficacy of an idea lacking bold relief. Sloganeering masquerades as discourse while hashtags run in packs. Twitter is said to carry out revolutions while tumbling down a click hole outpaces the page-turner.[2] ‘[A]ll around us in the cultural sphere we see only the spectacle of the intellect latching onto a catchword when a personality does not have the strength to keep silent and draw on its own resources.’ Barred from conceptions of severity, we have entered a world in which there can be no entering of adulthood.
Since the restructuring of the 1970s, the celebration of indeterminacy has unveiled its own set of party tricks. When it is not simply adhering to formal analytic schematics, the thought of this society places its bets on a cockfight of competing and extrinsically intersectional discursive narratives anemic to universality. Holding discourse primary, affective multiplicity supplants all epistemic foundations within a plurality of identities. Each is more depraved than the next and readymade for being misunderstood and excluded. For the exaggerated subjectivity, knowledge develops as an interpretive enterprise the moment the faculty of discernment evaporates.
It used to be said that what thought lacked above all was trenchancy, an appeal for ideas to become dangerous. This plea was a luxury our own epoch can no longer afford. Saying two plus two equals four has in fact become an insurgent claim at a time when the paramount wager of a public debate becomes the validity of objective reality itself.[3] Has common sense become as unpredictable as the weather?
Perhaps there is nothing new with struggling to maintain attention. Hunger can topple a sentence faster than poor grammar. Words, despite the allure of thinking of them as company, cannot take the place of things, persons, or a place. They cannot be kept or tracked, followed indefinitely or counted on to fortify against butchery. Not learning to read and write is non-negotiable, it is an apparent and real fact for some people. This is not our discussion. Instead, we want to distinguish the ways in which language has stopped meaning, and where there have been exceptions.
We are concerned with illiteracy as a studiable phenomenon. And the ways in which visual media on the one hand, the culture industry generally, and temporality in music ultimately contribute to this. We are resolutely against discussing food, but are willing to grant there are myriad endeavors providing us with tasteless alternative.
3.
In 1951 Adorno described the offensive ring accompanying the words ‘cultural criticism’. At the time, its tone elicited a viewpoint positioning itself exterior to its own object. It criticized culture without comprehending its own imminent position and as such, fortified itself as a ‘salaried and honored nuisance’. However, its process of not understanding that which it judges is an historical development, one in which its enthusiastic degradation unto a propagandist or censor can hardly be said to characterize cultural criticism in the present moment. No intellectual or political investment propels cultural criticism today. The Halbbildung that culminated in the postwar period no longer bears the signature of the bourgeoisie—who initially emancipated the idea of culture—but instead now indiscriminately pervades the social whole irrespective of one’s relation to the process of production. The universal right and indefeasible soundness of public opinion speaks both in-itself and for-itself. Even the conjunction ‘cultural criticism’ itself murmurs grey and would do best to make way for the niche and employment skill of ‘cultural commentary’, a common road that can be taken in casual dress whose preferred implement is the text over any meaningful piece of writing.
Despite these differences, Adorno’s reflections wield invariant tendencies. Similar to the traffic cop, the rank of cultural critic synchronizes with its surroundings while bickering with that environment’s individual products. Technologically aided by the latest platforms, they are spry and without the gravity of committing to the difficulty of an idea. Expeditiousness takes on the appearance of clever judgments. Criticism has rescinded to that simple and virtuous model of the exchange relation for which one opinion is worth just as much as another: the thought of the general equivalent. The exalted transparency of communication—the language of abstract and empty practicality—has become the universal medium of untruth that levels all qualitative distinction under a bright moon in which all cows are commensurate. It is the vacant claim of a freedom whose antinomy is found everywhere: ecological catastrophe grants passage for luxury cruises across the hitherto frozen Northwest Passage; the intimacy of a ‘girlfriend experience’ proliferates while the consumer market for sex robots comes into its own.
To reproach the claims and presuppositions of cultural and aesthetic products is to tread upon a delicate territory. At present, the clamor of economism resounds from the depths of critical analysis whose concern with material impoverishment stands ‘ready like worms to content themselves with dirt and water.’ In the face of unprecedented underemployment, austerity and debt, invoking cultural criticism can appear as simply epiphenomenal, or even insensitive. However, in times of crisis, critique is responsible for premises of greater scale. The transformation of the world is not executed by the economy itself, nor in realizing its unfulfilled dreams of need and want. In fact, one implicit aim of Cured Quail is to explore and demonstrate the common stake shared by each perspective: that sensational and urgently felt anguish of the social whole threads together the proclivity of taking something for an experience not experienced. ‘By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.’
4.
In these loud times for which one is rarely at a loss for words, the relentless veneration of communication places the prospects for another journal at a disadvantage. Further, a journal having anything to do with art cannot presume its own legitimacy, nor can it, notoriously, be self-evident that anything ‘concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.’ As such, aside from the aporia of a journal self-knowingly premised upon an illiterate world, Cured Quail must also distinguish itself from other publications by abandoning the confidence of presupposing prima facie external relations between culture and nature, the artist and the commodity—in a word, between art and society.
Cured Quail seeks to approach the works of both intellectual and artistic phenomena on their own terms and unearth—whether satirically, covertly or inadvisably—the contradiction between what is said and what is meant. To write on art today bears greater import than its simple supplement. There is the added difficulty of having to recall an experience of sensibility while furthest from it. More often than not, writing today oscillates between a clever wit without commitment or a postured sincerity floating on the surface. Successful writing on art predominantly consists in cursory patronage for seasonal furor and positing substance where there is none, usually under theoretical premiums with only the semblance of coherence. Bygone pedantic recitals on art history on which personal taste was mounted are almost lamented for their edified stability. In contrast, today’s hostility towards any type of specialization procures watered-down meanderings that celebrate indeterminacy by speaking ‘circumstantially and, as it were, plastically’. Its promotional copy weaves in and out of history arbitrarily while being largely informed by menial gossip accompanied by dubiously loose analytic associations and phraseological archetypes manageable by underage feed followers.
The editors of Cured Quail cannot promise expertise, not for a lack of knowledge, but because communicating takes for granted a shared stake that we seek to question. Instead, we extend an invitation, along with the contributors, to undertake appreciation while granting that there is widening deafness to just such an endeavor. That may be the fitting reaction by which to judge our progress. Nor can the editors pretend humility. It would be just another cunning way of the journal to advertise itself by accommodating others. Further, it will come as no surprise—to those who have learned to be suspicious—that we do not intend to be topical by prohibiting thought to catch its breath, nor can we account for trends or identities that would grant either a larger audience or a minority to find themselves in our pages. This is said with the caveat that, in the future, it is inevitable that both groups will be irrelevant, and that which is written will be a record and not a force. For this, it can be said that Cured Quail will try to think at the level both required and repulsed by the times.
Cured Quail
Footnotes
1. Jordan Ellenberg. ‘The Summer's Most Unread Book Is…’
2. Against the charge of nostalgia, let is be stated that it is of course easy to join the cultural niche curmudgeonly bellowing the unforeseen consequences of what is referred to as the ‘information age’ and the way it might be said to be adulterating ‘millennials’. However, it should be soberly recalled that the development of technological mass media is only the most frivolous expression of a social need that requires instantaneous communication, a need whose origins cannot be reduced to technological capacity per se, but that historically specific social forms already administer the content of social utility.
3. Tina Nguyen. ‘The First Trump-Clinton Debate Is Getting Weirdly Metaphysical’. Vanity Fair. 26 September 2016.
The critic need not be able to do better than that with which he finds fault.
—G.E. Lessing
1.
Let us presume, for a moment, that illiteracy need not represent a line dividing those who can read from those who cannot, but instead refers to the habit of hanging private thoughts on the framework of grammar. We begin with a simple dictum that the reader does not find what she desires, but desires only what she finds. Without abandoning this second structure of identification, the adherence to a generic world turns into its opposite and the reader of our dictum comes to impute into herself the categorical imperative to subject everything other than self to self. Perhaps with this rendition we approach understanding how a society inundated with words can be so suspicious of ideas. Even now, the authors cannot help but suspect that the mediating universals between each sentence appear as bottomless chasms inviting resentment from the reader.
Under the defensive mechanism of seeing oneself in everything, reading requires that when aversion stirs an attentive unfollowing is practiced. Who today hasn’t learned to live by distraction? Apperception then, born out of the discovery of imitation, culminates in a thought: this is the way things work. Seemingly facile, the approach advances the means by which language dwells in the presence of husks.
It follows that the projection of the reader is a prohibition on the writer. Just as one finds in clichés the experience that is his due, so must readers find in the appearance of words on a page ideas adequate to themselves. ‘Have you read [insert a name that identifies a milieu]?’ turns into exacting a reply ethically appropriate with the life of a shared fantasy. In response, how might one discern and trace a social economy of reading and writing whose ideal model is the wordless furniture assembly manual?
The present authors thereby invite those interested to participate in the dilemma of a journal that, in all likelihood, will not be read. Bothered by the fact that the leniency of language has turned against itself, this introduction outlines the terrain and substance of Cured Quail. We would like to approach the fact that words, like the lives that carry them, appear predominantly without meaning—while, following in the spirit of Karl Kraus’ Die Fackel, refusing to look the other way. Rather than cynically guilt people into reading more, Cured Quail would like to encourage others to indulge in the discontinuity between themselves and what is to be read. The aporia potentially offers an alternative to readers who, justly distrusting the authors, find in that disjuncture experiential content. After all, words subsist in saying something that hasn’t been thought or thinking something that cannot be said.
2.
Ours is, without fail, an epoch lacking the incentive to pause in the presence of an idea. We read the way we do everything else: sycophantically, timidly, incoherently. A book can be both a bestseller and, at the same time, the most widely unread.[1] In the past, the breakdown of authority gave prominence to ideas. They used to ride in on horseback. Now, the impatience over long ideas fades into a skepticism over their very existence. ‘[E]ars which have not let themselves be deprived of their native sensitivity cannot help hearing that they are talked into something.’ Forced into pandering to the experience of its patron and affirming what is already the case, an ‘idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, [lacking] the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.’
Words obstinately remain the medium in which the first integration between subject and object takes place, ‘the great medium of spiritual unity.’ When considering the circulation of a thought, it would be inaccurate to elicit the analogy of the commodity, the latter at least incorporates a law of competition. Rather picture a clump of fallen leaves, half floating, half sunk, in a kiddie pool for the contemporary efficacy of an idea lacking bold relief. Sloganeering masquerades as discourse while hashtags run in packs. Twitter is said to carry out revolutions while tumbling down a click hole outpaces the page-turner.[2] ‘[A]ll around us in the cultural sphere we see only the spectacle of the intellect latching onto a catchword when a personality does not have the strength to keep silent and draw on its own resources.’ Barred from conceptions of severity, we have entered a world in which there can be no entering of adulthood.
Since the restructuring of the 1970s, the celebration of indeterminacy has unveiled its own set of party tricks. When it is not simply adhering to formal analytic schematics, the thought of this society places its bets on a cockfight of competing and extrinsically intersectional discursive narratives anemic to universality. Holding discourse primary, affective multiplicity supplants all epistemic foundations within a plurality of identities. Each is more depraved than the next and readymade for being misunderstood and excluded. For the exaggerated subjectivity, knowledge develops as an interpretive enterprise the moment the faculty of discernment evaporates.
It used to be said that what thought lacked above all was trenchancy, an appeal for ideas to become dangerous. This plea was a luxury our own epoch can no longer afford. Saying two plus two equals four has in fact become an insurgent claim at a time when the paramount wager of a public debate becomes the validity of objective reality itself.[3] Has common sense become as unpredictable as the weather?
Perhaps there is nothing new with struggling to maintain attention. Hunger can topple a sentence faster than poor grammar. Words, despite the allure of thinking of them as company, cannot take the place of things, persons, or a place. They cannot be kept or tracked, followed indefinitely or counted on to fortify against butchery. Not learning to read and write is non-negotiable, it is an apparent and real fact for some people. This is not our discussion. Instead, we want to distinguish the ways in which language has stopped meaning, and where there have been exceptions.
We are concerned with illiteracy as a studiable phenomenon. And the ways in which visual media on the one hand, the culture industry generally, and temporality in music ultimately contribute to this. We are resolutely against discussing food, but are willing to grant there are myriad endeavors providing us with tasteless alternative.
3.
In 1951 Adorno described the offensive ring accompanying the words ‘cultural criticism’. At the time, its tone elicited a viewpoint positioning itself exterior to its own object. It criticized culture without comprehending its own imminent position and as such, fortified itself as a ‘salaried and honored nuisance’. However, its process of not understanding that which it judges is an historical development, one in which its enthusiastic degradation unto a propagandist or censor can hardly be said to characterize cultural criticism in the present moment. No intellectual or political investment propels cultural criticism today. The Halbbildung that culminated in the postwar period no longer bears the signature of the bourgeoisie—who initially emancipated the idea of culture—but instead now indiscriminately pervades the social whole irrespective of one’s relation to the process of production. The universal right and indefeasible soundness of public opinion speaks both in-itself and for-itself. Even the conjunction ‘cultural criticism’ itself murmurs grey and would do best to make way for the niche and employment skill of ‘cultural commentary’, a common road that can be taken in casual dress whose preferred implement is the text over any meaningful piece of writing.
Despite these differences, Adorno’s reflections wield invariant tendencies. Similar to the traffic cop, the rank of cultural critic synchronizes with its surroundings while bickering with that environment’s individual products. Technologically aided by the latest platforms, they are spry and without the gravity of committing to the difficulty of an idea. Expeditiousness takes on the appearance of clever judgments. Criticism has rescinded to that simple and virtuous model of the exchange relation for which one opinion is worth just as much as another: the thought of the general equivalent. The exalted transparency of communication—the language of abstract and empty practicality—has become the universal medium of untruth that levels all qualitative distinction under a bright moon in which all cows are commensurate. It is the vacant claim of a freedom whose antinomy is found everywhere: ecological catastrophe grants passage for luxury cruises across the hitherto frozen Northwest Passage; the intimacy of a ‘girlfriend experience’ proliferates while the consumer market for sex robots comes into its own.
To reproach the claims and presuppositions of cultural and aesthetic products is to tread upon a delicate territory. At present, the clamor of economism resounds from the depths of critical analysis whose concern with material impoverishment stands ‘ready like worms to content themselves with dirt and water.’ In the face of unprecedented underemployment, austerity and debt, invoking cultural criticism can appear as simply epiphenomenal, or even insensitive. However, in times of crisis, critique is responsible for premises of greater scale. The transformation of the world is not executed by the economy itself, nor in realizing its unfulfilled dreams of need and want. In fact, one implicit aim of Cured Quail is to explore and demonstrate the common stake shared by each perspective: that sensational and urgently felt anguish of the social whole threads together the proclivity of taking something for an experience not experienced. ‘By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.’
4.
In these loud times for which one is rarely at a loss for words, the relentless veneration of communication places the prospects for another journal at a disadvantage. Further, a journal having anything to do with art cannot presume its own legitimacy, nor can it, notoriously, be self-evident that anything ‘concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.’ As such, aside from the aporia of a journal self-knowingly premised upon an illiterate world, Cured Quail must also distinguish itself from other publications by abandoning the confidence of presupposing prima facie external relations between culture and nature, the artist and the commodity—in a word, between art and society.
Cured Quail seeks to approach the works of both intellectual and artistic phenomena on their own terms and unearth—whether satirically, covertly or inadvisably—the contradiction between what is said and what is meant. To write on art today bears greater import than its simple supplement. There is the added difficulty of having to recall an experience of sensibility while furthest from it. More often than not, writing today oscillates between a clever wit without commitment or a postured sincerity floating on the surface. Successful writing on art predominantly consists in cursory patronage for seasonal furor and positing substance where there is none, usually under theoretical premiums with only the semblance of coherence. Bygone pedantic recitals on art history on which personal taste was mounted are almost lamented for their edified stability. In contrast, today’s hostility towards any type of specialization procures watered-down meanderings that celebrate indeterminacy by speaking ‘circumstantially and, as it were, plastically’. Its promotional copy weaves in and out of history arbitrarily while being largely informed by menial gossip accompanied by dubiously loose analytic associations and phraseological archetypes manageable by underage feed followers.
The editors of Cured Quail cannot promise expertise, not for a lack of knowledge, but because communicating takes for granted a shared stake that we seek to question. Instead, we extend an invitation, along with the contributors, to undertake appreciation while granting that there is widening deafness to just such an endeavor. That may be the fitting reaction by which to judge our progress. Nor can the editors pretend humility. It would be just another cunning way of the journal to advertise itself by accommodating others. Further, it will come as no surprise—to those who have learned to be suspicious—that we do not intend to be topical by prohibiting thought to catch its breath, nor can we account for trends or identities that would grant either a larger audience or a minority to find themselves in our pages. This is said with the caveat that, in the future, it is inevitable that both groups will be irrelevant, and that which is written will be a record and not a force. For this, it can be said that Cured Quail will try to think at the level both required and repulsed by the times.
Cured Quail
Footnotes
1. Jordan Ellenberg. ‘The Summer's Most Unread Book Is…’
2. Against the charge of nostalgia, let is be stated that it is of course easy to join the cultural niche curmudgeonly bellowing the unforeseen consequences of what is referred to as the ‘information age’ and the way it might be said to be adulterating ‘millennials’. However, it should be soberly recalled that the development of technological mass media is only the most frivolous expression of a social need that requires instantaneous communication, a need whose origins cannot be reduced to technological capacity per se, but that historically specific social forms already administer the content of social utility.
3. Tina Nguyen. ‘The First Trump-Clinton Debate Is Getting Weirdly Metaphysical’. Vanity Fair. 26 September 2016.
